Mary Allen
How do rabbits perceive their environment? The sense of smell plays a central role in this. Hearing and sight act more like sentinels, reporting enemies.
The first sense in rabbit life is the smell. Already in the womb, he starts his activity. In this way, the developing fetuses smell the food their mother is eating in the amniotic fluid. They remember this even weeks after birth and prefer this food to others. Baby rabbits are born deaf and blind. The sense of hearing becomes active around the ninth day after birth, and the eyes open a short time later. In the beginning, the sense of smell is the only orientation. Thanks to ascent in the mother’s milk, it guides the little ones to the teats, which are essential for survival.
Social life and the search for food take place in the adult long-eared ears mainly in the olfactory world. If you put a rabbit in a new hutch or an exercise pen, it will immediately sniff everything intensively. It uses its chin gland to place scent marks on objects to show “I live here”. With another scent gland, which opens into the anus, poo can be scented at will and deposited as a kind of calling card. This is “read” by other rabbits, sniffing it. It reveals the origin of the rabbit, its sex, and its age. Free-ranging rabbits also scent marks their paths. In this way, the animals can also find their way around at dusk or when fleeing from a predator.
With all the scents that surround the rabbit and that want to be analyzed, it is not surprising that the nose is almost constantly on the move. The typical, cute-looking wink in the nose increases as the rabbit’s attention increases. This allows more air to reach the highly sensitive olfactory cells in order to analyze the smells. Rabbits have 100 million olfactory cells and are therefore close to dogs with their 300 million olfactory cells. With their seven million olfactory cells, cats are completely beaten off, and humans, with their five million olfactory cells, are nowhere near as good as rabbits. So a large part of their world remains closed to us.
The sense of taste is closely linked to the sense of smell. Rabbits are little gourmets with a preference for delicate, spicy leaves. But they are also quite available for tart, even bitter herbs. With their 17,000 taste buds, they can distinguish sweet, sour, bitter, and salty just like we can. The sense of taste also helps distinguish between edible and inedible plants.
Sharp Hearing and All-Round Vision
Almost as important as Long Ear’s nose are his ears, the so-called spoons. They pick up sounds, rotate in their direction like direction finders, and analyze whether they are familiar or potentially dangerous. The ears can move independently of each other, similar to a chameleon’s eyes, and rotate around 270 degrees.
As a popular prey animal, a rabbit can rarely lie relaxed in the sun and enjoy life. Foxes, martens, polecats, ermines, lynxes, birds of prey, and ravens are a constant threat. Eyes and ears protect the close range, but also the wider environment.
The human hearing threshold is set at zero decibels, rabbits hear down to minus five decibels. So you still hear noises that are too quiet for our hearing. The rabbit ear perceives frequencies from 100 to 50,000 Hertz, our human ear hears from 16 to 15,000 Hertz. We can hear somewhat lower tones with it, but the rabbit ears work well into the ultrasonic range, which in turn remains closed to us. This is not only theoretically interesting but also has practical implications for rabbit husbandry. Marten deterrents and other repelling devices that work with ultrasound must never be in the area of the rabbit hutches. This would lead to constant stress and health problems for the rabbits.